Four months in, on our own account and our clients'. These are the five that changed how we build every campaign.
1. A hint is a situation, not a keyword
The auction scores your context hints, the ad title, the description and the landing page together, and it rewards them describing the same moment. Hints written about the product lose to hints written about the moment the buyer is in. The title follows the same logic: it works when it answers the hint, naming whose problem it is, what the thing is, and what is on offer. Twenty years of search trained everyone to type product terms, and that instinct is the most expensive one to keep. The method is in context hints are not keywords.
2. Launch with a hundred ads, but not on day one
OpenAI's launch guide asks for at least a hundred ads across distinct situations, and a hundred is the right target. On a new account we still open with ten, paused, and read what review does to them before anything scales, because a wave of rejections on a fresh account costs more than a slow start. Once the ten are clearing, the hundred goes up, and with that many situations live the winning topics show within days and the budget can follow them. Write them as different angles on different situations, and keep rewordings of one ad out of the count. The reasoning behind the bar is in why you launch with 100 ads.
3. The pixel has to be proven before the first click
Conversion bidding is where the cost actually moves, and it can only work on conversions the platform can see. A successful response from the pixel proves nothing about whether the event was recorded. We have watched a campaign convert nobody because the form on the page was broken while every check said it was fine. Prove one real event end to end, from the browser to the reporting table, before you spend anything. The setup is in conversion tracking on ChatGPT ads.
4. The page decides more than the ad
Around three in four paid visitors leave within seconds, most without scrolling at all, on pages that load correctly with the form on the first screen. The average visitor sees less than a fifth of the page. These people arrive in the middle of a question they were already asking, and if the first screen does not answer that question the click is gone. We now spend more time on the page than on the copy.
5. Iteration beats budget
Rewrite the situations as the concrete failures the buyer would recognise, lower the bid, and move the budget onto the situations that are earning clicks. In our campaigns that has cut the cost per click by about a quarter and brought the cost of a booked call to less than half of the target, with the first calls arriving inside two weeks. None of it took more money. Whether the channel holds up to that treatment is the question behind is ChatGPT Ads a performance channel yet.
Sources
The campaigns we have been running for ourselves and for clients since July, and OpenAI's own documentation on how the auction works.
